5 reasons CEOs should care about climate impact
Grow revenue. Reduce economic risk. Attract new investment. Drive innovation. Recruit and retain the best talent.
5 things that feature in the annual KPIs of most CEOs – all of them part of the bigger picture of positioning a company for success.?
It’s still rare for sustainability to make it to that list.?
But it absolutely should be on the radar for every CEO today.
Growing revenue, reducing economic risk, attracting new investment, driving innovation, recruiting and retaining the best talent – how a company addresses their environmental impact and embeds sustainability into their business model, is now central to each of these goals.
In terms of ROI, it’s a no brainer?– let’s explain why for each of those core goals.
Goal 1: Grow revenue
Year-over-year revenue growth is a core metric for evaluating overall health, and for predicting the future growth and financial viability of a business.?
Growing revenue can be done in many ways (hiking up prices, for instance), but strategies for increasing customer acquisition and retention are key to ensuring that growth is for the long-term.?
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Increasing customer acquisition means finding ways to differentiate from competitors to gain market share, and/or entering new markets to find new customer bases.?
With consumers actively looking for sustainable brands across all industries (here’s a summary of the research to prove that demand), embedding sustainability into your operations offers a huge opportunity for competitive advantage and reaching new audiences.?
Increasing customer retention means gaining the loyalty of those customers, making sure that they have the best experience possible with your brand.?
Value alignment is a huge part of that: in the same way we connect with people that share similar worldviews to us, consumers connect with companies that share their worldviews (known as?customer-company identification) – and with the climate crisis now so intrinsically connected to identity and politics, how a business is addressing environmental impact is incredibly influential.
Thinking about long-term growth, it’s also worth remembering that it’s highly likely that we’re currently only seeing the very start of a tidal change in how consumers search for and evaluate products and brands.
Sustainability is an ideal right now, but in 10 years time it will be an expectation – and the companies that aren’t considering climate impact won’t even be on the radar at all. To maintain year-over-year revenue growth, sustainability has to be top of the roadmap right now.?
“These trends are only heading in one direction. A clear purpose, backed up with authentic action, makes an organisation more investable, more productive and more attractive to talent and customers. For those organisations already making purposeful commitments, there will be no turning back and others will follow.” – Sarah Moore, Head of Purpose at PwC UK
Read the full article on the Lune blog, where we also cover: